Thursday, July 17, 2008

My garden would take over the yard if I let it. Everything there-tomato, zucchini, watermelon, and cantaloupe-all look like they could eat a small animal right now. (Watch out, Maggy!) This is literally my first garden. (Well, like I have stated before, this is hubby's garden, with a few exceptions, I just eat the fruit of his labor.) We grew a garden years ago before children and I had nothing to do with it because I saw the dog pee on it one time and that was it for this city dweller. We rented for years and didn't bother with a garden, except for a failed one I tried. Darn my brown thumb. Then we bought this house almost 5 years ago but just this year started a garden. Wait, I apologize, we grew tomatoes at times. But I really have never seen what zucchini, tomato, cantaloupe and watermelon could do if you gave them space.

My mouth is watering over the prospect of homegrown cantaloupe. It is my son's favorite. We have 6 right now in the plant and they are all about 4" in diameter. So cool! The watermelons I find are still babies. Last week I ate the first green bell pepper to come from my garden, I made it with chicken for fajitas, mmmm. You all know what's up with my zucchini, I have tons and can't keep up. My husband pulled 2 of the plants out earlier this week, but that still leaves us with 3, more than enough. My parsley, oregano and thyme are doing great, they must like the heat while in the shade. But I need to harvest my basil, it is flowering and I am worried that it will taste bitter. We have one struggling tomato plant in a pot, it has cherry tomatoes, and one huge tomato plant in the back of the garden with 3 green Roma tomatoes. Oh, and then we have a pepper plant yet we don't know which peppers are growing on it. It came with the bell pepper seeds but they don't look like bells. I don't know when to pick them and if they are hot.

I just realized this morning, and hubby realized last week, that my beans need a trellis. What? I don't know what I'm doing. I looked at pictures on the internet and got some ideas. Not so hard. I'll head to Home Depot later and buy some bamboo polls and make myself a trellis. The lazy, cheapo (sorry, frugal greenie) in me tried to find scraps in the garage first but they were too short. Darn! I'll post pictures of my trellis later, maybe.

On the down side, something is eating my bean plants. And I have no idea what is is? I put coffee grounds around it but whatever was eating it didn't care and helped itself to the leaves anyway. That makes me question if it is snails and I don't see tracks.

I loved growing a garden this year and I have learned a lot. I was sad in the beginning of the season because I thought this would be the last time we grew a garden. We went through a lot of work to design our back yard and had hopes of planting heat tolerant plants and flowers. But my husband told me just a couple of days ago he wants a garden again next year! Woo Hoo! We may scale it back a bit, maybe 2 zucchini plants and we may try to grow more in huge containers but we'll have all winter to plan that out.

I only posted a few a my garden pix, please see my sidebar slide show for more.

4 comments:

If you are thinking about increasing the size of your garden, you might want to think about Mittleider gardening. I use some of his methods now, and the whole garden will be converted next year. He has a method that allows you to grow a large amount of food with little space. And it's easy...obviously all gardens take work. I've been studying his method for months now and feel I could teach a course at some point to help others learn. It's genius.

Green & Clean- Thanks. I know you run your own home biz so you don't have as much time as I do to baby a garden. You are a busy woman keeping bad plastic and yucky things out of the baby's mouths. I think you've got that down pretty good.

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Thought I would let everyone know I don't make any money from writing about, listing, or mentioning any product I have on my blogs, It's The Little Thinks or Thinking Green Ways. I purely write about what I believe are the ups and downs of being and doing green.Thanks for stopping by and...Be Green.